The surrealist thinks he has outstripped the whole of literary history when he has written (here a word that there is no need to write) where others have written "jasmines, swans and fauns." But what he has really done has been simply to bring to light another form of rhetoric which hitherto lay hidden in the latrines.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Categorized in : Thinking Writing Swans

The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: Those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection, mere buoys that float on the waves.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

adversity class men

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

basketball hurt art

The people with the clear heads are the ones who look life in the face, realize that everything in it is problematic, and feel themselves lost. And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost. Those who accept it have already begun to find themselves, to be on firm ground.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

clear-head acceptance simple

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

gratitude pay attention

We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

success men life

In our rather stupid time, hunting is belittled and misunderstood, many refusing to see it for the vital vacation from the human condition that it is, or to acknowledge that the hunter does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, he kills in order to have hunted.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

vacation hunting stupid

Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

moving-on decision moving-forward

Life means to have something definite to do-a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty. Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

emptiness life mean

The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

ought regret past

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

bad-ass inspirational life

I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

stewardship environment land

I am I plus my circumstances.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

plus circumstances

This fighting-shy of every obligation partly explains the phenomenon, half ridiculous, half disgraceful, Of the setting-up in our days of the platform of "youth" as youth. ... In comic fashion people call themselves "young," because they have heard that youth has more rights than obligations, since it can put off the fulfilment of these latter to the Greek Kalends of maturity. ...[T]he astounding thing at present is that these take it as an effective right precisely in order to claim for themselves all those other rights which only belong to the man who has already done something.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

maturity fashion fighting

To wonder is to begin to understand.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

wonder

Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

vitality confusion love

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

serious-person mean art

The will to be oneself is heroism

Jose Ortega y Gasset

heroism oneself

What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

nations mediocre men

Strictly speaking, the mass, as a psychological fact, can be defined without waiting for individuals to appear in mass formation. In the presence of one individual we can decide whether he is "mass" or not. The mass is all that which sets no value on itself good or ill based on specific grounds, but which feels itself "just like everybody," and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

psychological waiting facts

Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

precarious acquisition men